The Addams Family

On a recent Saturday morning, I found myself in a Times Square rehearsal room watching a run-through of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s revival of La Cage aux Folles, which opens next weekend. Jerry Herman’s campy, bittersweet musical comedy, which won a 1984 Best Musical Tony, is based on the beloved French play (and later, a film) about a middle-aged gay couple—Georges, the impresario of a transvestite cabaret in St.-Tropez, and Albin, his semi-hysterical longtime companion, who is also the club’s biggest star—faced with a crisis when Georges’s son (the product of a heterosexual indiscretion 20 years earlier) announces that he is marrying the daughter of a right-wing politician and that the in-laws are coming to dinner, so everybody better put away the falsies and bugle beads and straighten up their act. I’ve always found the show tuneful and buoyant, if a little heavy on the treacle and schmaltz. But in that rehearsal room, without sets or costumes, Terry Johnson’s spirited, intimate, and deeply touching production (featuring a charming Kelsey Grammer as Georges and a knockout Douglas Hodge as Albin) made the show look like a classic—old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. A few hours later, at the matinee of The Addams Family, which opened last night at the Lunt-Fontanne, it was déjà vu all over again. The family here, based on the characters in Charles Addams’s gleefully morbid New Yorker cartoons, may be more homicidal than homosexual, but its problems are the same: The Addamses’ kohl-eyed, criminally insane daughter, Wednesday (Krysta Rodriguez), has fallen in love with the son of an Ohio real estate broker and the in-laws are coming to dinner, so everybody better put away the funeral finery and instruments of torture and . . . you get the idea. The Addams Family is an old-fashioned book musical, but unlike the current incarnation of La Cage, it feels—even with topical references to health care and such—dated.

The show has a lot to like, including Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch’s Grand Guignol sets and costumes, Basil Twist’s ingenious puppets, and a mostly terrific cast. Jackie Hoffman as Grandma and Zachary James as Lurch are hilarious, and the fabulously deadpan (if underused) Bebe Neuwirth looks Goth and gorgeous in a slinky black gown as Morticia. But despite the hard work of some very talented theater professionals, the show never feels more than just that—professional. Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s gag-heavy book, Andrew Lippa’s cheerful score, and Jerry Zaks’s efficient staging (he took over for McDermott and Crouch, though they’re still listed as codirectors) get the job done, but they don’t capture Addams’s graveyard wit or strike the sparks that bring a musical to life. That said, the audience went nuts, seeming to genuinely enjoy itself, and the show is reportedly raking it in at the till. To my mind, it boils down to one thing: Nathan Lane. True, since The Producers, his trademark shtick has become a little familiar. But as Gomez Addams, with a pencil-thin mustache and an accent equal parts Ricardo Montalban and Bela Lugosi, Lane keeps the enterprise afloat and steaming full speed ahead, steering it back on course when it starts to meander and making sure that no punch line, double take, or slow burn falls overboard. Whatever they’re paying him, it’s not enough.